You won't read this on MSM ever.
'ON SEPT. 11, 400 miles from the collapsed World Trade Center towers, three dozen passengers and crew aboard United Flight 93 remained in airborne purgatory. Starting at 9:30 a.m., for some 30 minutes, 14 of them managed to telephone either loved ones or operators on the ground.
Public relations man Mark Bingham got through to his aunt's home in California. "This is Mark," he began. "I want to let you guys know that I love you, in case I don't see you again." Then, "I'm on United Airlines, Flight 93. It's being hijacked."
Two other callers from the plane not only provided information but also gleaned vital news from those they phoned. Tom Burnett, chief operating officer for a medical-devices firm, made a number of brief calls to his wife, Deena. Speaking quietly, he asked her to contact the authorities and told her that a male passenger had been stabbed — later that he had died. A woman, perhaps a flight attendant, was being held at knifepoint, and the hijackers claimed they had a bomb.
Jeremy Glick, a salesman for an Internet services company, also managed to phone. In a long conversation with his wife, Lyz, Glick said the hijackers had "put on these red headbands. They said they had a bomb...they looked Iranian." The "bomb" was in a red box, he said. The couple told each other how much they loved each other. Glick said, "I don't want to die," and his wife assured him that he would not. She urged him to keep a picture of her and their 11-week-old daughter in his head, to think good thoughts.
Burnett's wife, who had been watching the news on television, told him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. "My God," he responded, "it's a suicide mission." By the time he phoned a third time, after news of the crash into the Pentagon, she told him about that, too. Burnett seems to have been seated beside Glick, and apparently relayed all this information to him.
Were they to do nothing, the two men must have agreed, they were sure to die anyway when the hijackers crashed the plane. They resolved to fight for their lives. "A group of us," Burnett told his wife, "are getting ready to do something." "I'm going to take a vote," Glick said on his call. "There's three other guys as big as me and we're thinking of attacking the guy with the bomb."
So began the minutes of brave resistance, the clearly defined act of courage that has lived on in the national memory. Glick and others were equipped in more ways than one to confront the hijackers. He was 6-foot-1 and a former college judo champion. Burnett, at 6-foot-2, had played quarterback for his high school football team. Mark Bingham was a huge man, 6-foot-4, and at 31 still playing rugby. A few years earlier, he had fended off a mugger who had a gun. His mother got the impression, as he talked from Flight 93, that her son was talking "confidentially" with a fellow passenger. She felt that "maybe someone had organized a plan."
A new book offers a detailed account of how passengers ended a 9/11 flight before it crashed into the Capitol
theweek.com